


black sheep come home

by qunsio



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, Natasha-centric, On Hiatus, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8761471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunsio/pseuds/qunsio
Summary: “I think we could be good for each other,” he says.She snorts. “You should get to know a girl first.”--Steve and Sam are sent to kill the infamous Black Widow. They have another idea.





	1. Chapter 1

If she’s ever able to retire, she’d like to do it in a flat like this. Sunday paper on the honey-toned, wood counter, a rattly old fridge in the corner, and big slanting dormer windows with soft grey curtains. She picks a plum from the bowl on the counter, steps out of the kitchen to keep the spilled whiskey from reaching her shoe. How much does it cost to rent this place? Hardwood floors, endless counter space, a guest bedroom. A part-time high school swim coach making enough to live here on his own?  He must have known how easily he could be discovered. Below her, the old swim coach slouches against the counter as he retches foamy blood down his chin. Maybe she can ask him how much his rent is. She looks at his grimacing face. He begins to shudder. Maybe next time. She snaps a polaroid picture to send to her employer, pockets the plum and locks the door on her way out.

She has no further marks set in France, but her ride out of the country won't be available for another three days. Things are a lot less efficient without an organization behind her, but three days should leave her time to dispose of whoever’s been tailing her.

Out on the street stands the same man who's been following her since she arrived in Nice. He seems not to notice how his looming, aggressively handsome figure stands out, particularly on a residential street populated only by the two of them and a couple of loitering teenagers. Not a skilled spy. He must have many contacts if he’s been able to track her. He looks up at a rooftop behind him, presses a finger to his ear, and then attempts to play it off by running his hand through his blond hair. A terrible spy. A terrible spy with a sniper backing him up, though. She’s outplayed, for now. They’re close enough to a school that she trusts that he won’t want to start a fight just yet. She’ll keep this interaction public until she can get out of the sniper’s range.

She walks past the man, to a trashcan that should be directly in the sniper’s line of sight. With a flourish, she takes out her gun, wraps it in a napkin, and places it in the trash. She turns around in time to see the agent’s shocked face. She almost laughs--he’s a parody of a useless agent. She tilts her head towards the café at the end of the block and begins to walk. He comes up to trail a few steps behind her, subtle as a bulldozer.

She’s been camping out on this café while casing the old swim coach, and there’s always a scattering of people dining both inside and out on the patio. And, since, the owner is in her pocket, she can find her way out through the back once she figures out the agent’s play.

The owner is out waiting tables, and when he spots her, he exclaims with mock alarm, “Nathalie? Tu as besoin d’une place pour _deux_ aujourd’hui?”

“Ouais,” she says, warning in her voice.

He inclines his head. “À l’intérieur ou sur la terrasse?”

She turns to the agent. “Want to sit inside or out?”

“La terrasse, merci,” her agent replies, with a mild American accent and a quiet smirk.

“Thé glacé, jolie?” the owner asks as he gestures them to a little wooden table.

“Oui, merci,” she says as she takes her seat. She positions herself so the agent can see his sniper over her shoulder if he wants to. She has no doubt he’ll make some painfully obvious expressions directed at his distant partner.

“Pour vous?”

“Rien, merci,” her agent says. He scans the patio, openly evaluating everyone seated around them. It’s almost insulting that someone sent this man after her.

“So,” she says, once she’s received her iced tea. “You’re here to kill me.” He whips his head around again to make sure no one has heard her. She sips her tea, says,“I don’t die easy.”

Likely for the benefit of his comm, he enunciates, “No one has to die.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What’s your sniper here for?”

“Backup. If you thought you were in danger, why’d you toss your gun?”

She fights the urge to smile; she’s never needed a gun to do what needs to be done.

“I know when I’m cornered,” she says instead. “And I had to come hear whatever it is you want to say.”

His eyebrows draw together, honestly confused, as if every line on his wholesome face and every dragging step he’s taken hasn’t told her how badly he’d rather talk to her than kill her. He begins to ask, “How did--” but cuts himself off and turns slightly to the right, where his earpiece is. He frowns slightly--disapproving of his partner’s advice. Interesting. He squares his shoulders. “I think,” he says. “I think we could be good for each other.”

She snorts. “You should get to know a girl first.”

“I mean, I’d really love to have you on my team,” he says emphatically. “I’m with SHIELD, if that wasn’t clear.”

“You’d like me on your team?” she says, a delighted grin spreading over her face. SHIELD, an American spy agency that has spent years passively hoping to kill her, wants to recruit her. Too damn good.

“Yes!” he says, matching her grin. He’s sitting there with his absurdly straight teeth and his blue, blue eyes, genuinely trying to recruit her. He’s just-- Unreal. His smile falters. “Um,” he says, and misreading her silence, continues with passion, “Clearly I have some doubts about SHIELD, or I wouldn’t be sitting here and talking to you instead of doing what I was asked, and believe me, I know you’d be risking a lot to drop your independent act to join us, but. I-- I don’t know. I really believe we’re making the world safer.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Okay, I know that’s not going to be convincing if you don’t know what we do outside of taking out master assassins, and maybe you don’t care about the state of the world. But we know what kinds of jobs you’ve been favoring and which targets you choose when you’re not killing for pay. You’re trying to _do_ something. And if you care about a single person--” and his eyes meet hers, searching. She can’t think of a single person she cares about, anyone she wants to protect. “--even if that person is just you, you deserve a chance to make the world better for them. For yourself.”

Does she care about herself, even? She’s built all this artifice, all these names and faces to keep herself alive, and now she has only the loosest connection to the world. And he-- he thinks she can make up for all of that with SHIELD?

Of course, regardless of anything he says, her answer _should_ be a flat no and a knife to the neck, but this kind of barefaced honesty, this passion and faith, has thrown her. Maybe he was faking being a terrible spy all along; maybe he’s a genius, maybe he convinced her that he doesn't know what he’s doing and can’t lie for shit so that when he tells her he’s going against orders (orders to kill her) because he has faith in his team and in the world and in her, she’d have no choice but to believe him. She tries it for herself, an honest statement: “I’d like to believe you, but this sounds like a lazily set trap.”

“Come find out,” he says.

She rolls her eyes.

“Well, why not?”

“I won’t be your prisoner.”

“Of course not. You’re the Black Widow,” he says, reverence lacing his tone. “I don’t think anyone could keep you against your will.” And he looks so _warm_ , his skin gone pink in the afternoon sun, his corny button-down worn and soft, one button stretched to its limit at the center of his chest. His hair falls just so and his mouth--

She seriously considers her hustler-master-interrogator read on him.

“Think about it. I’ll find you again tomorrow. We can talk terms.”

He stands to go, and soon after, nauseous with uncertainty, she does too.

In her peripheral vision, she spots a blurred figure on a rooftop two streets over. The sniper must be moving, directing the agent to another position. The sniper will be be heading to a new vantage point, probably somewhere a bit out of the way now that they’ve been made a hundred times over by their incompetent partner. Her best guess is an apartment building a block west, the second tallest in the neighborhood, so she settles into an easy run in that direction, trying to keep her mind on tracking the sniper rather than on the very stupid decision she’s very seriously considering.

On arrival, she finds the building gate has been left propped open, and she takes a moment to savor the world’s capacity for optimism before she jets through to the stairwell. Four flights of stairs, taken two at a time, and she's on the roof. Twenty seconds to catch her breath, and another fifteen seconds for the sniper to arrive, swooping in from the sky with a ridiculous winged contraption spread out behind him. He lands in a run and lets his wings fold up behind him.

“Jesus,” he says when he turns and sees her. “You _are_ good.” She smirks. “So you, uh. You come to a decision already?” He’s awkward, remains distant. Does he want her to decline? His goggles obscure half of his face, rendering him nearly unreadable.

She says, “Hoping to get a second opinion.”

He laughs. “Man,” he says, pushing his goggles to the top of his head. He’s handsome, especially when his nervous grin dissolves into something sterner. He holds himself loosely, shoulders relaxed, hip cocked, a stance that says he’s confident that he can’t be knocked over. He bites his lip when he looks at her, and she nearly reciprocates the signal before she remembers herself. He says, “Honestly, I didn’t want to get into this.”

“So he should have killed me?”

He sighs. “Look, Steve signed up for this hoping we’d either bring you back a changed woman or fail entirely.”

“Is that what you want? To fail entirely?”

“You’re dropping a lot of bodies.”

“And you’re not?”

“No,” he says, with the certainty that comes with a sense of moral superiority. “I’m not.”

She changes her approach. “Your friend says he can help me.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how good his thing is, the SHIELD thing.” So he’s not with SHIELD? If he isn’t a spy-- probably army. Both of them are likely army-trained. Explains their incompetent attempts at subterfuge. He continues, “But I know Captain America--” _Captain America_ ? “--and he thinks you’re worth it. He’d stick up for you. Nothing bad could happen on his watch. Well. Nothing _that_ bad.”

“You trust him that fully?” He nods. Then he tilts his head minutely, towards his earpiece. That’s her cue. “Thanks for the talk,” she says. She jogs to the edge of the roof, and jumps to the nearest patio.

She holds still long enough to hear, “Man, she was just here. Did a flip off the roof right before you got here.”

Then, “What? Should we go after her?”

She doesn’t wait to hear the answer.

*

Monday mornings are busy at her cafe, and today is no exception. She finds a vacant armchair to settle in and, feeling indulgent, orders a pot of black tea.  She pours her tea, stirs in milk and sugar, and, with her hot mug held between her hands, she waits. Her backup, a body double, sits at a table by the door, sipping a latte, waiting too. It's been two days since her last encounter with the agents, but they should be here soon. If they're even halfway competent, they should have eyes on this cafe.

Halfway through her second cup of tea, the agent--Captain America--comes in and all but collapses into the seat across from her. He holds his expression carefully neutral, but he can’t contain himself, his legs bounce and he leans across the table. Disturbingly eager.

“You’ll join us?” he asks.

She takes a sip of tea. She’s not sure if she should play stoic or helpless, so she tries to settle into something natural.   “I can offer conditional agreement.”

He smiles and _good lord_ \-- she’s sure he’s competent on the battlefield, but with that smile he should be doing recruitment full-time. He scrambles her brain so badly that when he says, “What conditions?” she has no idea what he’s talking about for a moment.

She has a list of questions about SHIELD. She asks, one by one. Every now and then he’ll say, “That’s classified,” but for the most part, he gives her direct answers. She’s gaining valuable intel here and there, but mostly SHIELD sounds like an efficient bureaucracy, and she can infiltrate bureaucracies in her sleep. Safety shouldn’t be a significant concern, nor general autonomy. She’ll have to treat her time there like she’s on job all the time, but that’s hardly different from her current situation. And the Captain is so happy to tell her about it, about SHIELD’s flaws and strengths, and he is so clear and honest. She’d be lying if she said he wasn’t starting to affect her decision. It all seems so easy. She’d be relatively safe, except when on assignment, she’d have access to as much tech and intel as she'd need, and she’d have nearly guaranteed allies. And, well, having the Captain on her side will help her gain influence at SHIELD, so she’ll have to devote significant time to maintaining this relationship--

“Anything else?”

She presses her lips together. “I agree with the terms as they have been set before me thus far.”

“Great!” he says, and there’s that unreal smile again. “Welcome to the team. I’m Steve.”

She takes his outstretched hand. “Natasha,” she decides. Her American name. She feels a little sick.

The sniper enters the cafe. He comes to sit at the table, positioned so that he blocks the primary exit. He introduces himself as Falcon, smiling warily. The body double glances at her from over his shoulder.

Natasha tries to keep their attention on each other, asks them simple questions that they can rattle off long answers to. They talk about next steps, about the next three years Steve will help her through and-- they spend three years on training? She forgot how bureaucracies splice your life into sections like that: recruit, junior agent, senior agent, specialist, and on and on and on. She could be moving through the ranks until she dies. What will she do with herself once she’s settled in there? Does she know how to stay in one place with one affiliation? How to set down roots and build a life? Has anyone like her ever settled? She doesn’t know if she wants roots that dig that deep, but she imagines that once she’s in, once she has intel even beyond what these doofuses have already given her, they wouldn’t simply let her go. She can escape these two, but could she escape with all of SHIELD’s attention directed at her?

The sniper is suggesting they all leave, to get ready to go to headquarters. He heads out with a comm to his ear. Steve beams at her.

She decides: no. This isn’t happening right now.

She and Steve stand to go, and she signals her double. A man brushes between Natasha and Steve, and her double steps in. Natasha creeps over to the kitchen as the double leads Steve to the door. Natasha picks up her getaway bag at the back exit. At the front of the cafe, three people start shouting and a dish clatters to the ground as her double breaks into a sprint. Natasha slings her bag over her shoulder and starts walking to the bus station. She memorized a combination of buses that will take her to Monaco.

She’ll go, think more, figure out how to store her assets in case she does join SHIELD. Or in case she dies. She likes to be prepared.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i gave up on finding translations. sorry / you're welcome

 Nights are cool in Almaty, even in mid-June, and they provide much needed respite from the beating sun, so she doesn’t mind walking home at 4 AM with her client, Ali, after sitting cooped up in series of increasingly crowded nightclubs all night. He’s a restless drunk, always likes to sway his way down the sidewalk rather than take a taxi or call his driver. He hums a song to himself, low in his throat, and ignores her. This is a respite, too, from his near-constant attempts to impress her. The air is clear and the streets are nearly empty. Almost pleasant.

The job is quiet for her tastes and more long-term than her usual, but she needs to build up her cash supply and lay low for a few months, and sometimes it’s nice to do a cushy job for the ultra rich. Ali’s father, a very anxious man, called her in after his son received several death threats from dealers located downtown. She neutralized the threat quickly (money solves most problems), but Ali has kept her on payroll because he thinks she’s pretty and smart. Ali isn’t terrible company; he likes to talk to her in English and Russian about the philosophical woes that all rich boys seem to have, and he doesn’t try anything untoward. He probably thinks they’re friends.

They arrive at the hotel, and Ali swerves away from the front entrance to go through to the garage. “We must tell my driver that he doesn’t have to come for us,” he says. She nods, though Ali could just as easily WhatsApp him.

In the garage, she chats with the guard to practice her Kazakh and to peek over his shoulder at the security footage. There’s nothing notable, just a couple of Americans in the lobby. Though the blond looks familiar. The guard sees where she’s looking. “ _They have been there for an hour,_ ” he says in Kazakh, and then, grinning, touches each of his biceps and flexes in a muscle man pose. She looks closer and-- shit. That’s Steve. The other man faces away, but he’s wearing Falcon’s bulky wingpack. This isn’t good.

Ali wanders over, and she directs him to the screen. “These guys look suspicious,” she says. She knows how he’ll react--half-step back, a shocked hand to his chest. It’s easy to take threats seriously when you take yourself seriously. She herds him upstairs through a staff elevator and makes a show of checking the halls ahead of Ali while she mentally runs through the weapons she has stored in the room. She fits the key into the lock. She’ll probably need a short knife and a handgun. The door swings open, and a blow smacks against her stomach.

“ _Oh shit!_ ” Ali says in Kazakh.

“Safe room,” she grunts. She plows into the man who smacked her and knocks him on his ass further into the flat. Ali runs in behind her, fingerprint keys into his safe room, and slides the door shut behind him.

“Hah?” says one of the eight scrawny agents now crowded in Ali’s living room. In Kazakh he asks, “ _Who is she?_ ”

“ _Girlfriend_ ,” she says, shutting the door. “ _You need something?_ ”

“Yes,” says one. This agent stands with more confidence than the others, but her arms are equally scrawny when she crosses them across her chest. Some kind of cyber-based criminals, likely. “ _We came for Ali, but his whores are welcome too._ ”

“ _Enough_ ,” she says. She slides her gun into her palm.

The door busts open behind her and two new agents loom behind her. She lunges past the agent she knocked over earlier, vaults over the kitchen counter to get out of agent nine and ten’s range.

Before she can peek her head around at the new agents, she hears a gunshot and she narrowly avoids taking a bulky brown boot to the head as two huge men leap over the counter.

“You sure know how to keep things exciting,” Steve says, crouched next to her, wearing a white T-shirt and armed with the rounded slab of his shield. This is how he dressed to fight her?

Falcon crouches on her other side, also wearing a T-shirt, but at least also wearing protective eyewear and some kind of gauntlets. “How we gonna play this Widow?”

She breathes out through her nose and wills her brow to uncrinkle. Cabinet handles dig into her back and two strangers’ bare arms press against either side of her. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. She speaks lowly, “I have an innocent boy in the other room. I’ll deal with you after I take these agents out.”

She pivots on one knee, kneels with her face close to Steve’s, and stretches her arm around the corner of the counter to shoot two agents. She hits one in the forehead, the other in the shoulder because Steve grabs her arm. She glances at him. What is he doing? She drives her elbow into his ear and leaps out of his reach.

The ringleader is pulling a gun. Before the leader’s arm straightens, Natasha rams into her, legs circling her waist, hands around her throat. She leans her weight into her left arm, uses her right to wrest the gun out of the leader’s hand. She leans harder, trying to squeeze the tremors out of the body underneath her as she lines up to shoot the agent trying to open the safe room.

A body presses up against her left side, encases her on the right side, and a metallic ringing blasts the sound out of her right ear. Steve, crouched, hugging her, wrenches her off the now-still ringleader and shifts his shield to block two more bullets from a second shooter. The impact reverberates through his arm and he smacks her on the nose a bit.

“Sorry. Looked like you could use a hand,” he says.

“Go for the first,” she says, taking hold of the straps keeping the shield on his arm. She slides the shield off, and, holding it in front of her, she runs straight into the second shooter like a battering ram. She drives the shield into the man’s jaw, knocks the blunt edge of it up with her knee again and again until his chin makes a vicious cracking sound and his body crumples forward.

Behind her, Steve is sparring with one of the beefier agents. He seems to be pulling his punches for some reason, but he’s in no danger. A gasping breath to her right-- Falcon is struggling in a chokehold. She sees the back of the agent’s head and Falcon’s arms reaching backwards, clawing at the man’s scalp.

“Turn!” she shouts to Falcon.

Falcon spins so they both face her. She frisbees the shield, hoping to clock the agent in the nose, but instead it skims off the top of his head and lodges in the fridge behind them. Enough to loosen his hold, send him staggering backwards.

“Good arm,” Falcon croaks. Endlessly chatty, these boys. He yanks the shield out of the fridge, a hiss of cool air following it, and uses the momentum to ram the shield into the staggering agent’s ribs. Another nice _crack_.

They both turn to look at Steve, who is still sparring with the same beefy woman. Falcon looks on, waiting for a good place to jump in. She watches in confusion for a few seconds, then takes out her gun and shoots the woman. The woman collapses against Steve. He looks up, brow wrinkled.

The three agents left are crowded around the entrance to the safe room, hooking strange machinery up to the locking mechanism. One has a gun trained on them. She begins to raise her gun, but Falcon places a hand on her wrist. He hands Steve the shield. Steve throws his shield against the wall so that it ricochets down the hall like a riot of cymbals, blocking the agent’s wildly fired shots and knocking all three agents in the head. They fall to the ground.

“Cool trick,” she says, willing the ringing out of her ears. Steve smiles. “Let me check on my client and then we can get to business.” Steve stops smiling.

Ali comes out with the wide-eyed, straight-backed look of a man trying very hard to stop being drunk. He nearly retches at the sight of the man she’d shot in the head and turns quickly away. “ _A few are alive_ ,” she says in Russian. “ _Call your father’s men to take care of them. I need to talk to these ones_ ,” she says, indicating Steve and Falcon.

Ali’s terror dissolves into worry. He places a hand on her shoulder. With great feeling, he says, “ _Be careful, Natalya._ ”

“ _Of course_ ,” she says, perplexed by his worry, and then, turning to her agents, she says, “Let’s go.”

Ali whispers something to Steve and Falcon as they trail her out of the flat. Falcon mumbles, “C’mon Steve.” Steve half drags and half stomps his feet all the down the hall.

The roof will be best, she thinks. No cameras there. When they catch up to her at the elevators, Falcon looks extremely skeptical. Steve moves first, joins her in the elevator with Falcon walking quickly after him, his disgruntled face screaming _this is a bad idea, Steve_. He’s not wrong. She’d have an easy upper hand if she fought them here. Three’s a crowd in this elevator, especially with men as big as they are. They’re lucky she doesn’t want to be seen. She grins at them, and Steve smiles uneasily back. Falcon gives Steve a look of disbelief.

Falcon has a gun at his hip, a knife too. Steve has neither, just his shield. This will be a tactically interesting fight. Usually, her opponents bring guns and backup, armed with more guns. She rolls her shoulders. She’d love to watch a couple simulations of the fight that’s about to happen, maybe talk theory with an ally.

They reach the highest point the elevator will take them to, and she leads them to a staircase going to the upper-level roof. The building ends in two places, like a split-end, one roof level ten meters below the other. The staircase lets out right next to the edge of the upper-level roof, so if you stumbled disastrously to the right straightaway, you’d land on the lower roof level without dying.

As they exit onto the roof, she trips Falcon, and he stumbles disastrously to the right. He’ll be back in a second, flying wonder that he is, but not before she has a few minutes to incapacitate Steve.

Based on the shock in Steve’s eyes, he did not case the building layout beforehand. He tucks his head down and lunges to try to grab Falcon’s ankle. She axe kicks him with the point of her heel at the back of his neck. With a grunt, he changes focus, grabs her planted leg to throw her off balance. She falls so that her weight rests on his shoulders. She squeezes his neck between her thighs to cut off his airflow. He kneels on the ground, his fingers digging into her legs to try to pry them apart. He’s _strong_ , the little points of pressure from his fingers nearly enough to break her grip. She’ll have some funny bruises after this. She claws at his fingers with one hand, scratches at his face with the other. If she can hold this for ten more seconds--

The soles of Falcon’s boots kick her across the face and shoulder, knocking her off Steve’s shoulders. He’s clearly not used to kicking--surprising for a flying agent--so the impact does little more than bruise her face and get dirt in her hair. He overshoots, too, so he lands a good 5 meters away.

Steve’s up in a second despite the oxygen deprivation--she tries to remember, is Captain America a superhuman?--and he comes back in with his flat, round hunk of metal raised. He meets her blows with his shield or forearm, swings for her torso with his closed fist. He must know he’ll never kill anyone this way.

Falcon swoops in again, using loose limbs and momentum to knock her on her ass.

“Neither of you ever learned to use a gun?” she asks. Steve laughs as he charges in, shield forward. She ducks down, lets him sweep past her, rolls onto her back and pulls her gun out to nail him in his ridiculously unarmored back.

Suddenly Falcon is floating in her peripheral with his gun trained on her. She turns her gun to him, but he shoots first. Cuts through her left shoulder. She has to shut her eyes on the pain for a second, and Steve rushes in to kick the gun out of her hands.

“Assholes,” she grunts.

She bounds up, and Steve charges at her. She needs to get to Falcon. Can’t fight hand-to-hand with a gun looming in the distance. She backs up to cover her rear with a metal air conditioning structure. The pain is making her sluggish, and Steve’s nearly on her. He thrusts his shield and it clips her left arm as she steps aside. She tries to ignore the pulsing pain in her arm and shoulder. The shield gets lodged in the metal tubing, with Steve’s arm still in it. She steps on Steve’s knee--he has good posture, but is too predictable--lunges up to stand on his shield, and leaps off it.

She grabs Falcon by the knees. One arm gone cold and slick with blood, she clambers up his legs and is amused to feel his pants start slipping down. He kicks out, zigzags in the air to try to throw her. She’s up to his waist before his jerking gets erratic enough to do any damage, and by then she’s securely positioned. She reaches around his very muscled chest to loosen the straps that hold the harness in place.

He zips to the right, suddenly, then they begin to fall. In the seconds it takes to drop fifteen meters to the lower roof tier, Falcon closes his wings and turns so his back faces down. She’s not quick enough, only manages to tuck her head into his neck before her back slaps _hard_ against the gravel. She nearly blacks out from the force of the fall. Falcon has the courtesy to let out a long, pained moan.

“Don’t you complain,” she mutters in a wheeze. She draws up all four limbs and throws him off of her.  They’re dangerously close to the edge on the lower roof--no more margin of error. She tries to listen for the sound of Falcon or Steve approaching her, but at this point all she can feel is a noisy haze of pain. She shuts her eyes and breathes a harsh breath in through her nose. She can’t fight in this state. She has to end this immediately.

On the exhale, and her options come to her rapidly: 1) she can throw Steve off the building, and Falcon will surely catch him. She can escape in the time it takes him to do that. But, if Falcon finds her again, he will almost certainly kill her for trying to kill Steve. Or, 2) she can throw herself off the building. Falcon will either catch her or not. If he catches her, they’ll talk again, and she’ll join SHIELD or become a prisoner. If he doesn’t catch her, she’ll die a stupid death.

In the long term, both plans rely on Falcon’s mercy. Throwing Steve is a better bet, she knows. Her stomach churns as she lurches upright. Her left hand is a block of ice at the end of her arm. She stands just in time to see Steve land just next to her. Falcon is in the air already. With a pounding in her head, Natasha adjusts her stance to make it look like she’s going for Falcon, and, as expected, Steve launches himself at her. It’s easy work to redirect him and flip him over the edge of the roof. The panic on his face as he slips over the edge--

He brings his huge, gorilla arm around, grabs hold of her ankle, tries to pull himself up, and she tips over the building, too. She falls into his shield and the force of her tumbling bodyweight knocks him down and away, out of her reach. Falcon won’t have time to swoop in twice and save both of them. The wind whips her hair from her face, and she thinks, _This is it. I’m going to die a stupid death._

But-- Steve’s maneuvered himself closer--perhaps more used to falling than she is--and his shield-bearing gorilla arm stretches out. If she tried, she could reach the edge of his shield. His eyes are red and watering from the wind. “Take it,” he yells. Her eyes are watering too. She grasps the edge of it at the same time Falcon swoops in from the side, seemingly intent on catching both of them at once. Steve’s body hurtles towards her and the edge of the shield collides with her sternum and knocks the breath out of her.

Before she passes out, she hears someone say, “You stupid shit,” and laugh.


	3. Chapter 3

She wakes in a cell. Bare, alone. A bed, a mirror and sink, a toilet. A wrapped up sandwich on a tray by the door. Her entire body aches, but the pressure in her head is overwhelming. A familiar pressure. She recently sustained a blow to the head, and now she’s dehydrated after being unconscious for--she sniffs herself--ten hours, give or take. 

She goes to the faucet and hears a whirring sound from behind it. A camera behind the glass zooming out, her mind suggests. Very discreet. She turns the faucet on, ducks her head into the sink and lets the water run directly into her mouth. She drinks for 7 seconds, any longer and she’ll get queasy. She needs food.

She picks up the sandwich--standard American canteen stuff, ham, cheese, old lettuce and crumbly bread. She unwraps it and forces it into her mouth, bites off a great hunk and begins to chew. It’s like pressing her teeth around a used paper towel. She chews through the whole thing.

She goes to the sink again, drinks for another 4 seconds. The camera whirrs again. She pulls up from the faucet. Makes her best guess at the camera’s location, looks straight into it. With a clear, steady voice, she says, “Send someone in.” 

The door hisses open. A guard. He says, “Captain America and Falcon want to talk to you,” and she can’t help but roll her eyes.  _ Of course. _

*

While she waits for them in another bare room, someone comes in to give her water. He mumbles, “Anything else?” and avoids her eyes. She doesn’t look at him, but the scar cutting through the tattoo on his knuckles is familiar. She may have saved his life on a freeway in Seoul. Or maybe she tried to kill him? Difficult to remember.

“It’s a bit chilly in here,” she says, testing.

He gives a convincing look of affronted disbelief, and says “I’ll go adjust the thermostat.” He leaves the door open when he goes. She smiles.

It’s simple work, uniform switch, fingerprint spoof, vent navigation, motorcycle hot-wiring, and she’s out. She dumps the motorcycle in a river, ducks into a department store, and emerges an average American woman.

*

She leaves America quickly, ends up south, near the equator, where the summer months are blurry with heat and thick with humidity. An old rival catches up with her along the way, sits next to her on a bus and slides a knife between her ribs before he catches a bullet to the eye. 

She touches the wound. Poisoned. The next stop is in Bogotá. She knows a medic there and has a safe house a little farther north. She flushes the wound out with her water bottle, presses her scarf against the bleeding, and hopes she’ll last that long.

The medic meets her at the station, a bundle of herbs at one side, a first aid kit at the other. All too eager to help. Likely needs another favor. The medic packs smelly leaves into the wound, lends her a car, presses a damp slip of paper into her palm. “My sister’s daughter is missing,” she says, hopeless. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” she slurs. 

The medic nods. In Spanish, says, “ _ I’ve left plenty of water in the car. Drink and pee as much as you can. It will take time. You will need to sleep. _ ”

“Mmm,” she agrees, and drives off.

*

She wakes up at a roadstop, aching an ache that makes her bones feel like they’re somewhere between compressing into her organs and bursting out of her skin. Her hand shakes as she wipes the crust in the corner of her eyes away. She sits up.

Falcon is there. He stands outside her car, ready to fight, some kind of drone technology hovering behind him. Flies buzz about his face, making his stillness eerier. He licks a drop of sweat off his lip. Her vision’s gone wonky in her right eye; she can’t tell exactly how far he is from her, nor how far behind him the drone is. He hasn’t killed her yet, though. Probably here to talk. Again. How does SHIELD get anything done with agents like this?

She rolls the window down. The air is hot and wet. Her whole body starts shivering. Her chapped lips pull apart piece by piece, her dry tongue sticks to the grooves in the roof of her mouth. Before she gets a word in, he says, “Cap’s not here.” He steps closer. “He sent me on the legit lead, because he knows SHIELD can’t touch me, and he thinks I won’t do anything to you.”

She knows, right now, he won’t do anything. They’re in public, and he hasn’t done anything yet. He knows he won’t do anything, and he knows she knows. She’s so tired. She opens her mouth again, easier this time, and croaks, “So will you?”

“I’m still deciding.”

She runs her tongue over her cracked lips, and tries to discern anything from his expression. His ridiculous goggles block his eyes. He seems serious. He has a nice mouth. She’s  _ so _ tired.

“Please, take a seat while you decide. It’s hot out there.”

He smirks, but doesn’t move. She tilts her head back against the headrest so she can watch him with her eyes halfway shut. Doesn’t want her eyes to dry out.

*

She wakes up. The agent is sitting in the passenger seat, digging through her glovebox, his gun pointed lazily at her. He’s cuffed her right hand to the steering wheel. Not the left? Still underestimating her.

“Pass me some water?” she whispers.

“Where were you headed?”

She wants to lie, but it’s hard to think properly with her head so full of cotton and her body trying to escape herself. “Safe house. About eighty ki--um, fifty miles north.”

He hands her the water. She drinks and drinks and drinks until the onslaught of water starts to chafe against her throat. She feigns a coughing fit when she finishes. Coughs deep, from the chest, until she starts to sweat with the force of it. Her hair sticks to her forehead and the back of her neck. She heaves a deep breath at the end, scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“Sounds bad,” he says, trying to keep the sympathy out of his voice. “You going to die?”

“I’m still deciding,” she croaks.

He sighs, points the gun with more certainty. “Drive. We’ll go to the safe house.”

 

Once they’re on the freeway again, she asks, “Is your captain coming?”

He says coldly, “I haven’t told him I found you.”

“Oh.” He might kill her after all. She’s going to have to play this, get him too emotionally invested to kill her. She was never very good at playing for pity, but her poison-induced illness has given her a decent head start. “Is he--”

“Just drive.”

An hour later, they pull into a familiar driveway out in the bush. She is exhausted and sweating profusely, but Falcon is asleep. She leaves the car on, slips out of the handcuff, shuffles to the back of the one-room house, breaks into the back door, and then crawls straight into bed.

Falcon bangs the front door open, shouting, “Hey!” 

She buries her face defiantly into her dusty pillow and falls asleep.

*

When she wakes, her head is pounding again, and Falcon is seated in a hard-backed wooden chair pulled from the kitchen area, both of his palms curled loosely around a chipped teacup. The whole room smells like dust, scalding water and instant coffee. She crinkles her nose.

“You awake for real this time?” he asks.

“Huh? Yes?” she says. She can’t remember waking up before. 

“Tea?” 

“Please,” she wheezes through the grainy dryness in her throat. He goes, and his strange drone technology comes to hover over her. She squints at its glossy paint, wishing she knew its capabilities a little better. She wonders how long she’s been out of it. From the smell of stewed sweat in her clothes, she’d guess a day. So Falcon and Steve have been sitting on the redux of this mission for nearly a week. She’s going to have to wrap it up before they do.

She hauls herself upright, pulls her sweat-logged shirt over her head. She stuffs the shirt between the mattress and the wall and digs around the crevice surreptitiously. Her gun is missing, but further down she finds two old widow bites. The kettle screeches from the other room, and she yanks her hands back out. The sudden movement prompts her wound to start bleeding. A prickly, throbbing pain spreads from the puncture point.

Falcon returns with a ceramic bowl. “No food here,” he says, “No electricity. Just one bowl, one teacup, six types of coffee and tea and a kettle.”

“The essentials,” she croaks. She tucks the blanket over her fingers to protect her hands from the heat and takes the bowl eagerly. With her eyes shut, she breathes in the steam. She doesn’t have to feign the relief it brings her. It’s psychosomatic, she knows, but with each careful sip, her mind clears and her aches settle.

He’s looking at her when she opens her eyes. “Do you want to live?” he asks softly.

Once, back then, they had been on a training mission, she and the other girls, one of her first. The oldest girl in training, tall, with fine blonde hair and huge, dark eyes, led them through… something. The memory is fuzzy. Somewhere blisteringly cold and dry--perhaps in Mongolia?--a mission that left them stranded, burning through the ends of their stored rations as they tried to arrange transport. 

There were eight of them, but “only seven will make it,” the dark-eyed girl had said, with such certainty. “We don’t have enough money. None of us are authorized to be captured. One of us will have to die.” The girl looked each of them over with an impartial gaze. 

Even then, she had known an important truth: agents die. She hadn’t known: their lives are cheap.

The other girls, they were all taller or stronger or older than her. At twelve years old, she was certainly the cheapest there, but she had always had good instincts. Her hand slid to the knife in her pocket. She said, all too earnestly, “If you are willing to sacrifice another you must be willing to sacrifice yourself,” simply because she thought it to be true.

The dark-eyed girl had said, “What did you say?” and never said another word.

Her handlers had been so pleased. She told them exactly what had happened, and exactly what she had learned, not thinking to lie. They nodded, told her to curb her drama, and, more importantly, they corrected her. Their fingers resting light against the pulse in her neck, they taught her: life is valuable only as it pertains to the mission. They ran a comb through the ends of her hair, held her fingers between their palms, told her how mature she was to realize that.

She has no mission, now. There is no one and nothing waiting for her. Still, she seeks jobs, persists. This compulsion to stay alive, is it here in spite of her training, or because of it?

She replies, “I’m doing my goddamn best.” 

“Could’ve fooled me,” Falcon says into his teacup. “You’re making some powerful enemies.”

“A good spy should have plenty of enemies. Never know what they’ll be good for.” She winks.

He turns his small cup between his hands. “You got a lot of enemies. Not a lot of friends.”

“I’m picky.”

“Hm,” he grunts into his coffee.

“You want to be friends?”

“You need someone in your corner.”

“How benevolent,” she says drily.

“Folks got to look out for each other.”

“And you, you’re the look out?”

“Who else is gonna do it?” He hunches a bit when he says this--a sore subject? She knows she has to be a little less critical, less sharp, if she wants his sympathy, but she can’t help herself.

“What about Steve? Shouldn’t you be looking out for him?”

“What do you think I’m doing here?”

“I thought you were here looking out for me.”

“I’m multitasking.”

“ _ Tch _ .” She brings the bowl of tea to her mouth to keep herself from saying more. He doesn’t look offended, though. He comes to stand over her with his ridiculous broad shoulders and his little chipped teacup, and he’s barely threatening at all. He puts the cup down, sits at the foot of her bed, and she feels too much like she’s at a hospital with an anxious visitor willing her to recover.

“Were you really considering joining us back in France?” he asks. “Or was that part of the escape plan?”

She purses her lips and looks away, trying not to let the softness in his expression throw her. Too genuine, too open, these agents. “I was. I wanted to.”

“Not anymore?”

“SHIELD has been my enemy since my third or fourth foreign kill. SHIELD will never trust me. If I come in, I’ll never be able to leave.”

“You want to keep bouncing around like this? No friends? No roots?”

She shrugs. “I’ve never wanted roots.”

“Fine, maybe not roots. But you’ve got to want somewhere or someone to come back to. You're on the verge of death right now and your refuge is a cramped, hundred-year-old house with more dust than furniture. And the only person here to help was sent to kill you!”

Her head is pounding again. “I met with a medic earlier. She helped.”

“Look, I know it feels like freedom to make your own choices and forge your own way all the time. But sometimes freedom isn’t enough, sometimes you’ve got to prioritize living. The life you lead now doesn’t seem to be cutting it--” he glances at her knife wound and very nearly smirks. He clears his throat. “I mean, you’re not even covering the basics. No one as sick as you are should be living in a dustbin with no food, no electricity and no allies. You deserve to have a place to stay, and to know where your next meal is coming from, and to have friends at your back.”

He’s staring at the palms of his hands now, lost to her. He’s had to give this talk before-- to Steve? To other recruits? To himself?

He snaps back into the conversation. Says, “And if you really need to leave SHIELD, you can make that decision later. If you decide to run now, I don’t think we’re going to end up failing Cap’s mission.”

That’s a threat, even as couched in euphemism as it is. She tries to keep the conversation light, teases, “Is that a threat, Mr…” She blinks. Her eyes are drooping again. “I don’t know your name.”

“Falcon, in the field.”

Distancing himself from her even as he tries to dissect her psyche. She rolls her eyes. “Falcon,” she says.

After an interminable silence, Falcon says, “Listen, I’m leaving Redwing here--” the hovering tech has a name. “--and you’re not going to move. I’m going to get some food. I’m going to come back, and we’re going to eat. Don’t move.”

He rises from her bed, a mass of dark body armor with bare arms. He looks warm. He crosses the room in three easy steps, and slips out the door. 

  
She thinks a lot about getting up. Her bones still ache and she’s still exhausted and sore, but what else is new. There’s a sleeve with eight widow bites just outside the window, and her passport is stashed in the plant on the patio. She could decommission Redwing in five seconds and be out the window in ten. She’s burned through a lot of favors in these last two weeks of running, but she has some contacts in Venezuela that owe her. There’s always easy money in smuggling goods if she needs to pay her way across. She closes her eyes. She’d have to smuggle something light. Hopefully something she could sew into the lining of a blanket, she thinks, pulling hers up to her chin.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s a loud, rapid popping from the other side of the house and she bolts upright. Something fresh dropping into hot oil, her conscious mind tells her. Not a threat. From the kitchen wafts the smell of _meat_ and she didn’t know she was so hungry. Falcon turns around. “Water by your bed,” he says.

Her head spins when she leans down to pick it up off the floor. She drinks it groggily, and realizes suddenly how badly she needs to pee. Shoulder to the wall, eyes slitted, she lurches off the bed. She waddles to the bathroom, sits on the toilet. She sniffs herself and squints at the shower. No hot water, she knows.

She strips slowly, reluctantly. Falcon is humming a gentle tune in the kitchen. He talks to himself as he cooks. She steps into the shower, crouches with her arms around her knees and turns the faucet. The icy water beats down the back of her neck. No soap, so she scrubs at her scalp with her fingers until the grimey itch has dissipated. Out in the kitchen, the oil sizzles with renewed vigor.

When she shuts off the water, the air is warm on her cool, damp skin. She dresses quickly in a musty set of clothes pulled from under the sink, goes to stand in the doorframe to watch her houseguest. He has an easy command in the kitchen, no sense of urgency or doubt. He has a nice butt too. She runs her tongue over her teeth, wonders if poor impulse control is one of the poison’s later side effects.

Falcon glances over his shoulder to her. “Won’t be ready for another 40 minutes at least. Go back to sleep.”

He has refilled the water glass by her bed. She ignores it, lies down, but she’s itching to move. She slings her arm over her eyes to get them to shut.

*

“You up?” Falcon calls to her.

The sun is low, and she can barely see across the house. She should have told him to get fuel for the generator when he got food. It’ll be harder to tell when he lies if she can’t see his face clearly.

He’s humming again, scraping a wooden spoon against the bottom of a pot. He cooked something hardy. The smell of starch and meat and… tomato? in the air turns her empty stomach.

“I’m up,” she croaks back.

He comes over, deposits a bowl of orangey long-grained rice in her lap. She closes her mouth around the first bite, a piece of tomato bursts between her teeth, a sour complement to the fried pork and salty rice. She feels a bone-deep, primal satisfaction. She shovels the next eight or twelve bites into her mouth in rapid succession, and head to toe, limb to limb, her body restores itself, something hollow suddenly made solid.

At last, she remembers to be suspicious of her guest. He’s settled on the edge of her bed--she didn’t even notice him sit down--bringing calm, measured spoonfuls of rice to his mouth. It’s too dark to tell where he’s looking, but she can see that his lips shine from the oil.

“Can I ask something,” she says.

“‘Course.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“We all gotta eat,” he says. Stupid attempt to evade. She waits. He sets his spoon down. Tilts his head to her. “Cap and I aren’t that different. I like to see good people on good paths.”

She scoffs. “I’m good people?”

He smiles. “No, you’re right. You’re not good. More chaotic neutral. You seem about ready to tip into chaotic good, though.”

She considers it, living a life that considers “goodness” a goal both achievable and worthwhile. The thought of it doesn’t repulse her, which is a surprise on top of a surprise, given that it’s been presented in D&D terms. Her belly is full and she feels… not safe, but unthreatened. Maybe she could use some idealism.

She asks, “You think SHIELD is serving the greater good?”

He rubs at the back of his neck. “If there is a greater good, Cap and his team are doing their best to serve it.”

A sentiment too saccharine to be real, and yet she’s ready to believe it. All organizations are political, but she could have a hand in steering this one. She turns away, sets her bowl on the floor. “Ask me again next time I wake up,” she says, pulling at the sheets where they’ve bunched up under Falcon’s legs. She’s not tired anymore, but she needs to think.

*

When she wakes, she feels good. Her legs feel like they’re hers again and her mind is sharp. It’s time.

Falcon is asleep, sitting in the hard-backed chair from the kitchen, facing her. He must have been exhausted to have fallen asleep like that. His tech, Redwing, hovers over his shoulder as before.

She digs through the things she left in the space between the mattress in the wall. Using her fork, she cuts into the mattress as quietly as possible. She finds some tech, a phone, three more widow bites, and a cloaker and a surveillance bug, both of which she shoots at the drone. It sways in her direction a few times, like a suspicious cat, then stops and settles back.

She pockets her last widow bites and shimmies out the open window. She lands in the potted plant on the back patio, the lush fertilizer softening the impact. She pulls her passport from among the leaves. She’s got to get to the car. The quietest way is over the roof. She climbs up the patio structure, crawls across the roof. Something creaks far below her--Falcon waking? the drone?

She gets to the edge. She wishes she had a chance to eat more rice. She jumps.

*

“Just a few days,” she says when she appears at her medic’s front door two hours later.

“As long as you need,” the medic says desperately.

She nods, shoulders in past her host and shuts the door. Her tracker shows Falcon still at her safe house. She opens the surveillance app, sees Falcon pacing behind the house.

“ckuppickuppickuppickup-- Steve? No, shut up, I found her. She’s gone again-- Shut up-- Yeah. I’ll get you at the airport-- I don’t _have_ a trail yet. Don’t even have a car. Shut up. Yeah-- Sure thing, Cap-- Yeah-- Oh, fuck off.” He hangs up and mutters, “Jerk.”

“Oh, Miranda,” the medic sighs.

Right, her name is Miranda here. What’s the medic’s name? Ro-something? Roxanne?

The medic asks, “Is that work or pleasure?”

Terrible options. “Pleasure,” she lies.

The medic--Romy?--sits next to her, looks over her shoulder. “Handsome,” she says. “Dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Ro… Rhonda? Nearly.

The medic’s face folds in worry. Perplexing. “Be safe, Miranda. I can call someone for you.”

“It’s okay, Rosa,” she says, as it clicks into place. “I’m dangerous too.”

*

She lies across Rosa’s spare cushions, the glow of her phone casting soft shadows across her blanket. The room rumbles with Rosa’s raspy breathing and the pipes working water into the upstairs apartment. She’s gotten a few strong leads on Rosa’s niece. There are only two shady operations in town with the manpower to abduct someone. She’ll bust them both tomorrow, and the daughter will turn up, she’s sure. She has nearly nodded off, when in her earbuds she hears her surveillance bug pick up a faint conversation.

“Sam! Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Cap, I’m fine. Relax.”

A silence. Probably checking Falcon over. Steve asks, “What happened?”

“I talked to her. Seemed like she was coming around.”

“Same as the first time,” Cap says.

“Guess so.”

“What now?”

“We go after her,” Falcon (Sam?) says. “Don’t give me that look, Steve.”

“Sam, come on--”

“You’ve seen her kill list.”

“She needs an opportunity to do what’s right before we just--”

“We gave her that opportunity. She didn’t take it.”

“Of course not. Why would she trust us?”

“What do you want us to do, Steve? Trust--the trust you’re talking about--takes years to build up!”

“I know, damn it. But--”

Falcon cuts in, sharp. “What do you see happening next, right now?”

“I don’t know!” Silence. “I wish we had-- time. Time to come back and keep trying.”

“You know that’s not--”

“I know!” Another silence. “I know. Sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Falcon says.

 _Just like that?_ she thinks.

“You think we should stop her?”

“If she’s going to go back to what she’s been doing, it’d be irresponsible not to stop her,” Falcon says.

She can’t help but roll her eyes. They never say kill, just “stop.” A childish euphemism.

Steve sighs. Wearily, he says, “All right. Let’s go. Don’t want her to get too far.”

A pause. “You okay man?” There’s Falcon, looking out for his pals.

“Yeah. Let’s get to work.”

A clap--a hand on a shoulder? a manly hug? They talk about their next steps, and she wastes time wondering about the extent of their physical intimacy. Wondering if that intimacy would be extended to her, eventually, if she joined. Wondering if she’d like that.

“--back to the safe house?”

“Might as well,” Falcon says. “No electricity, but it’ll work for now.”

“No electricity?” Steve asks, and their talk dissolves into useless chatter about how she lives. She sits up. She needs to get started.

*

Five hours later, she’s on the road again. She left Rosa’s sister’s daughter lying asleep on Rosa’s spare cushions. There’s a plane going to Argentina leaving in two hours. She could be on it. She _should_ be on it. But, inexplicably, she’s driving towards her old safe house.

When she arrives, there’s a car out front. Steve is sitting on the trunk of it, his face scrunched up in confusion as she pulls up.

She rolls down the window, shouts, “Hey.”

“Hey?” Steve says.

“I’ve been thinking.”

Steve jumps off the car, steps closer carefully, like any sudden movement might send her racing off. “Yeah?” he asks.

“We should work together,” she says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Falcon opens the front door. “Hey, Cap, I think-- Oh what the goddamn hell.” He steps back and slams the door shut again. A few seconds pass before he comes back outside. “What are you--” he says. “You both are going to kill me.”

Steve smiles at him. Then at her. “Welcome to the team,” he says.

She smiles back.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are much appreciated! u can also talk to me on tumblr @ qunsio


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